In Between
Today I learned about cyborgs again.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, Samuel W. 1900. How Crops Grow: A treatise on the chemical composition, structure and life of the plant, for students of agriculture. New York: Orange Judd Co.
“All matter may be divided into two great classes – Organic and Inorganic. Organic matter is the product of growth, or of vital organization, whether vegetable or animal…All matter which is not a part or product of a living organism is inorganic or mineral matter (rocks, soils, water, and air).”
Thus begins the first chapter to Samuel Johnson’s 1900 treatise written for students of agriculture, titled “How Crops Grow.” Johnson’s training and political actions were critical in the formation of the Agriculture Experiment Stations in the U.S., departments based at agricultural colleges around the country focused on the scientific, or theoretical understanding of growing plants and animals. This idea is so powerful that it must be said, even when Johnson complicates the issue himself in the following pages. The organic portion of a plant is volatile, or combustible under the heat of fire, morphing into the invisible atmosphere. The inorganic portions of a plant morphed into ash, or a solid, when put under a flame. But Johnson says
“this is not an entirely accurate distinction. What is found in the ashes of a tree or of a seed, in so far as it was an essential part of the organism, was as truly organic as the volatile portion, and, by submitting organic bodies to fire, they may be entirely converted into inorganic matter, the volatile as well as the fixed parts” (Johnson, 1900: 14, emphasis mine).
Now there is apparent confusion between the “two great classes” of matter. In the ashes of a burned tree we see that there are essential parts of that tree that were equally as organic, or “the product[s] of growth,” as the parts that disappeared into air. Non-living elements comprised a living organism, which confused Johnson. This slippage between categories, while not more than a passing note in Johnson’s text, relates an analogous tension present in Haraway’s (1991) cyborg manifesto concerning the nature of objects. Johnson’s natural philosophy, the dominant theme in U.S. scientific agriculture at the time, rested on the division between organic and inorganic. Their reconciliation could not go unobserved to him, but he lacked the intellectual tools for a new ontology where the division between the two categories of organic and inorganic could be merged somehow. Haraway highlights the boundary breeches in the late 20th century between human/animal, machine/organism, and physical/non-physical, showing that the “backslash” is where we find cyborgs. Johnson’s plants, then, the objects of agriculture, could in their own way, in their own place and time, also be read as cyborgs, the confounding and confusing interplay between two parts of his reality: organic and inorganic.
Next I explore how reading Haraway’s cyborg manifesto might help us understand this tension that Johnson encountered some 90 years earlier. While the context from which they are writing is different, I believe they met the same philosophical problem. Haraway argues for the “cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource…the cyborg is our ontology…the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (150). Here Haraway is saying that we need a new resource that allows us to comprehend the world we have created. The cyborg is more than metaphoric, though, it is also descriptive of objects in the world, including objects that used to be termed “organisms,” “machines,” “humans,” and “animals” under the old capitalist, racist, sexist, progress-centered and appropriationist-centered ontology. This is Haraway’s political project, then, to both forecast and describe a new way of being outside of these divisions that were necessary for the “achievements” of modernity. To keep categories secure in modernity, a constant border war was required between the above mentioned groups to maintain their separation. Separation meant authority, domination, and control by some over others, which is the heart of many of the problems we encounter in today’s world: violence rooted in racism, oppression based in sexuality, and domination based on non-human. Haraway calls for us to find pleasure in cyborgs because when we start to see things outside of “human,” “machine,” etc., then we are stepping towards a dissolution of the categories that have caused so much harm.
If Johnson could have read Haraway’s 1991 article he may have understood plants in terms of an affinity of molecules rather than in terms of living or non-living. He says that “chemical affinity is that force or kind of energy which unites or combines two or more substances of unlike character, to a new body different from its ingredients” (Johnson, 1900: 30). Johnson’s agent of change was affinity, the force that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Haraway’s affinity functions much the same way. It is the force that brings a group of unlike bodies together to form a larger body to affect the sphere of politics. The living and non-living molecules of a plant are both necessary to form the body, or whole plant. The affinity, or the fact of amalgamation itself becomes the plant, and the categories themselves of organic and inorganic fall out.
Using the cyborg model retroactively is useful because it demonstrates how categories have shaped our understanding of, in this case, the botanical world in 1900. The cyborg as a tool allows us to observe assumptions from the past that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Johnson came to know the differences between organic and inorganic parts of a plant because he assumed that living and non-living were natural categories. He was seemingly confused by his observations that some elements, like carbon and nitrogen, could be found in each. His classification scheme shaped his observations.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, Samuel W. 1900. How Crops Grow: A treatise on the chemical composition, structure and life of the plant, for students of agriculture. New York: Orange Judd Co.
“All matter may be divided into two great classes – Organic and Inorganic. Organic matter is the product of growth, or of vital organization, whether vegetable or animal…All matter which is not a part or product of a living organism is inorganic or mineral matter (rocks, soils, water, and air).”
Thus begins the first chapter to Samuel Johnson’s 1900 treatise written for students of agriculture, titled “How Crops Grow.” Johnson’s training and political actions were critical in the formation of the Agriculture Experiment Stations in the U.S., departments based at agricultural colleges around the country focused on the scientific, or theoretical understanding of growing plants and animals. This idea is so powerful that it must be said, even when Johnson complicates the issue himself in the following pages. The organic portion of a plant is volatile, or combustible under the heat of fire, morphing into the invisible atmosphere. The inorganic portions of a plant morphed into ash, or a solid, when put under a flame. But Johnson says
“this is not an entirely accurate distinction. What is found in the ashes of a tree or of a seed, in so far as it was an essential part of the organism, was as truly organic as the volatile portion, and, by submitting organic bodies to fire, they may be entirely converted into inorganic matter, the volatile as well as the fixed parts” (Johnson, 1900: 14, emphasis mine).
Now there is apparent confusion between the “two great classes” of matter. In the ashes of a burned tree we see that there are essential parts of that tree that were equally as organic, or “the product[s] of growth,” as the parts that disappeared into air. Non-living elements comprised a living organism, which confused Johnson. This slippage between categories, while not more than a passing note in Johnson’s text, relates an analogous tension present in Haraway’s (1991) cyborg manifesto concerning the nature of objects. Johnson’s natural philosophy, the dominant theme in U.S. scientific agriculture at the time, rested on the division between organic and inorganic. Their reconciliation could not go unobserved to him, but he lacked the intellectual tools for a new ontology where the division between the two categories of organic and inorganic could be merged somehow. Haraway highlights the boundary breeches in the late 20th century between human/animal, machine/organism, and physical/non-physical, showing that the “backslash” is where we find cyborgs. Johnson’s plants, then, the objects of agriculture, could in their own way, in their own place and time, also be read as cyborgs, the confounding and confusing interplay between two parts of his reality: organic and inorganic.
Next I explore how reading Haraway’s cyborg manifesto might help us understand this tension that Johnson encountered some 90 years earlier. While the context from which they are writing is different, I believe they met the same philosophical problem. Haraway argues for the “cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource…the cyborg is our ontology…the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (150). Here Haraway is saying that we need a new resource that allows us to comprehend the world we have created. The cyborg is more than metaphoric, though, it is also descriptive of objects in the world, including objects that used to be termed “organisms,” “machines,” “humans,” and “animals” under the old capitalist, racist, sexist, progress-centered and appropriationist-centered ontology. This is Haraway’s political project, then, to both forecast and describe a new way of being outside of these divisions that were necessary for the “achievements” of modernity. To keep categories secure in modernity, a constant border war was required between the above mentioned groups to maintain their separation. Separation meant authority, domination, and control by some over others, which is the heart of many of the problems we encounter in today’s world: violence rooted in racism, oppression based in sexuality, and domination based on non-human. Haraway calls for us to find pleasure in cyborgs because when we start to see things outside of “human,” “machine,” etc., then we are stepping towards a dissolution of the categories that have caused so much harm.
If Johnson could have read Haraway’s 1991 article he may have understood plants in terms of an affinity of molecules rather than in terms of living or non-living. He says that “chemical affinity is that force or kind of energy which unites or combines two or more substances of unlike character, to a new body different from its ingredients” (Johnson, 1900: 30). Johnson’s agent of change was affinity, the force that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Haraway’s affinity functions much the same way. It is the force that brings a group of unlike bodies together to form a larger body to affect the sphere of politics. The living and non-living molecules of a plant are both necessary to form the body, or whole plant. The affinity, or the fact of amalgamation itself becomes the plant, and the categories themselves of organic and inorganic fall out.
Using the cyborg model retroactively is useful because it demonstrates how categories have shaped our understanding of, in this case, the botanical world in 1900. The cyborg as a tool allows us to observe assumptions from the past that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Johnson came to know the differences between organic and inorganic parts of a plant because he assumed that living and non-living were natural categories. He was seemingly confused by his observations that some elements, like carbon and nitrogen, could be found in each. His classification scheme shaped his observations.
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